When fundamentalism and free speech clash, the result is never
pretty. Such has been the furor over the cartoons a Danish
paper published last September that depicted the Prophet Muhammed,
among other things, with a bomb for a turban, with protests
by enraged Muslims turning violent around the world. (According
to a report on NPR, people are reacting to the cartoons now
only because some Danish clerics distributed a package to
their colleges throughout the world containing copies of the
cartoons, plus some more strongly offensive ones that weren’t
published.)

The intensity of the controversy within the media about the
right thing to do here surprises me a little, though I imagine
that Chris Judd on NewsBusters (a site devoted to “exposing
liberal media bias,” but that doesn’t exempt them from sometimes
getting their analysis right) got it partially right when
he said that part of the problem is that neither side—the
cartoonists or the protestors—are particularly politically
correct.

Still, I think many people would agree with me on a few basic
principles: Violence in response to the cartoons is absurd
and unforgivable, incompatible with any kind of a democratic
free world. It’s awfully hypocritical of societies, papers,
and leaders who have condoned similarly offensive cartoons
about Jews to complain when the tables are turned. And, the
cartoons themselves are pretty lame, without any apparent
political purposes other than to be inflammatory. (This latter
point could perhaps be debated. I usually come down on the
side of seeing a value, for example, in satire, even pretty
offensive satire, if it shakes people out of their established
thought patterns. As far as I can see, however, these cartoons
just reinforced an entrenched and unsubtle bias.)

I would hope that our feelings about freedom of the press
are not so deadened that it is controversial to say that the
paper had a right to run them. I would also hope that our
interest in free exchange of ideas and the role of the press
to make people think rather than inflame inter-group hatred
would also make it not too controversial to say that people
would also be reasonable in questioning the original paper’s
judgment in running them. Those two things are not incompatible.
It can’t be repeated enough that the idea of freedom of speech
means nothing until it is applied to speech we find distasteful.

What has gotten weirder has been the second generation of
fights over whether other publications should reprint
the cartoons. Right-wingers have called upon newspapers around
the world to reprint the cartoons as showing that the press
is actually free, and willing to make fun of Islam as well
as Christianity. The editorial staff of the New York Press
resigned over the decision of the publisher to drop the cartoons
themselves from an editorial package about them, while other
editors have been forced to resign for choosing to go ahead
and run them, and student papers running them have been recalled
and destroyed.

What gets me about the reaction to the reprint issue is the
near absence of discussion of context. It reminds me of the
controversy when David Horowitz tried to place lengthy Holocaust-denying
ads in student papers across the country. The decision to
accept the ads or not was frequently painted as black-and-white,
absent any discussion of the papers’ existing policies on
ad content (do they actually have a policy of accepting all
advertisers?) and how they put the ad in context (did they,
for example, run an editorial taking apart his ridiculous
propositions point by point?).

Similar questions need to be asked here: Are the cartoons
being reprinted as part of an editorial package exploring
the reactions to them? (The cartoons have indeed become news
in their own right after all, and so the public may have a
right to judge them for themselves.) Are they being reprinted
out of some sense of solidarity with papers under attack for
printing offensive content? Are they being reprinted out of
obstreperousness and glee at being as controversial as possible?
(Though this doesn’t apply in this case, I agree with our
editor that if they had showed up as a regular installment
of a cartoonist a paper regularly ran, that too would be a
different question from seeking them out on purpose.)

I don’t know that I would say any of the above are necessarily
reasons they should be printed, nor would I rule any of them
out as completely invalid, but they are all very different
animals, and should each be examined and debated in their
own right.

It also matters whether they are being run unquestioningly
alongside editorial that paints all Muslims as terrorists,
or being run with explanations of why they have upset people
and how they may or may not be accurate depictions of Islam
overall.

Like everyone else in a free society, or in fact more so,
the media have an obligation to balance rights and responsibilities
and think about the consequences of their actions. Free speech
is such a basic requirement to enable a press that means anything
and has any chance of telling the truth to exist that sometimes
defending it must trump concerns of sensitivity. But that
doesn’t mean sensitivity should be ignored. Indulging in base
stereotyping for no reason destroys journalism’s credibility—something
nearly as much in danger as freedom of speech.